Nick cannot believe his eyes: Mort Lear was a bloody genius even as a nipper. Nor can he believe that Tomasina Daulair has yet to turn him out for his bad behavior, his prurience—his outright invasion. (With pleasant spite, he imagines how horrified Grandfather would be at his cocked-up manners.)
Tommy walks back and forth, round and around the table, just looking. She shakes her head. “Unbelievable.” She puts her hands over her face. “Un fucking believable. I am sorry.”
Nick holds his tongue. He’s forced himself to pull back, to sit on one of the chairs not serving as an easel. Wait till Andrew hears about this. But then, no, what difference would it make to the script, essentially? Though perhaps the drawings themselves—
“All right,” says Tommy. The look she aims at him verges on accusation. “Do you get this? Is there some kind of explanation in those files you opened?”
“You should read the lot of it yourself.” He thinks for a moment. “You’ll need to read his e-mails to me first. I haven’t a clue what you know of what he told me. Then read the files that…led me to the key.”
He motions toward the kitchen, where Lear’s laptop still sits on the table.
She follows him. “Would you make me a cup of tea? Any kind,” she says, pointing vaguely to the jar containing the tea bags. “Please. And then just…”
“Make myself scarce.”
“Sorry. But stick around.” When she opens the computer, her face lights up in reflection, though her expression is grim.
Nick heads outside. The afternoon sky has turned sympathetically glum, but the air is still warm, too close. He walks around the back of the studio to the swimming pool. Petals blown from the surrounding fruit trees lie on the taut blue cover, as if snow has fallen in June.
Nick unlatches the wooden gate and enters the enclosure. He sits on a skeletal chaise whose cushions must be stored in the cabana behind the diving board. Tomasina told him that Morty had the pool put in “just because.” Because, Nick inferred, that’s what people do after they earn a certain amount of lucre and are expected to entertain their friends accordingly. He thinks of Andrew’s ebony pool, his canary-haired wife doing her knifelike laps. Was she part of that compulsory entertainment?
A week ago he was on fire about this project: nervy with anticipation, yes, but as Deirdre would have put it, “all cylinders ablaze.”
He pulls his phone from his pocket. Oh God, how can the list of numbers be so bloody long when he often feels as if he can barely count his true friends on one hand? Though, of course, so many of these “contacts,” as the mobile calls them, were transient, never intended for keeping long-term. He must learn how to delete them. No doubt Deirdre would know.
Here she is, twice over: the mobile she had while they were in Sicily and the one she had in the States, when they were hot on the trail of those prizes, ricochet-rabbiting about on that shameless campaign—the campaign that paid off for him.
Wherever she is, the worst she can do is not answer.
“Hello?”
“Deirdre? It’s Nick. Greene.”
A pause, a spasm of laughter. “Bear cub, is that really you?”
“Deirdre, I wish you’d stop calling me that. I’m actually not so young.”
“Old enough to know better, is that what you mean? But fresh—you are still fresh, my friend. Don’t try to deny it.”
“Oh bugger, call me what you like. I’m glad to hear your voice. Where are you?”
“Beside a pool in Palos Verdes. Where I’m staying on the current payroll. And being a very good girl, I might add. Drinking extra-virgin Arnold Palmers and iced feng shui. Pretending I like yoga. Down, dog, down!” More of her consoling laughter.
“Fancy that. I’m by a pool in Connecticut! A dormant pool. No party here. Just me. What’s doing, what’s the project?” His knee is vibrating. He’s sixteen again, juicing up the courage to ask Veronica—what was her surname?—to that dance. Godawful, as it turned out, both the dance and the girl.
“It’s a tom-com. Excellent money for solid mediocrity.”
“What’s a tom-com?”
“Bear cub. Really. Think Risky Business. Or, well, I suppose Splash. Except the Toms are a good deal older now. Cruise in this case.”
“You’re in a Tom Cruise movie? Brilliant.”
“I’m his mom. I’m a tom-com mom!”
“But you’re not old enough to be his mother.”
“In Hollywood years I am plenty old to be his mother. According to retroactive Hollywood math, you could easily become a mother at eight. I think…I even hope!…that I’m consigned to another decade of moms. If I’m lucky. Then grandmoms if I hit the jackpot. Dowager queens! Better than oblivion. Which is not where you are headed, cowboy. Although I see you’re in mild danger of typecasting. Another creative homosexual American? I’d go for a Glaswegian meth-head next time around. Or a womanizing con man. You need a palate cleanser.”
“Looks like I’m on for a new Alan Ayckbourn. The West End. I think I’m homesick.”
“Is that why you’re calling? Haven’t you acquired a new squeeze by now?”
“Deirdre, you scared me off.”
“Off? Honey, I have no idea what you mean.”
“Your cautionary tales.”
“I was doing my high-horse thing, was I? Lord, but I can be tiresome.”
“No, no! You tell it straight, like just about nobody ever does, and it’s a massive relief, Deirdre. You are a sage.”
On the other end of the line, he hears what sounds like the crunching of ice cubes, then a tide of passing voices. Deirdre isn’t alone.
“I’m interrupting your life,” he says.
“Interrupting my life? Please. I’ve been interrupting my own life as long as I’ve been living it. You are giving me a taste of continuity. Talk to me, in your beautiful swishy-swanky accent, for as long as you like. I’m just heading indoors so I can hear you better. I mean it. You didn’t call to shoot the breeze. Hang on.”
He waits till she says, “I’m all yours, cub.”
He tells her about his back-and-forths with Mort Lear before the man died, how it matters to Nick, somehow it really does, that the story in the film be true to the story that he’s sure is the right one, however subtle the differences might seem to most.
“Hardly ‘subtle,’?” she says. “I’m with you on the departure from truth. Though honestly, all these oh-so-serious, self-satisfied biopics depart from truth. People go to movies to part ways with truth. Wouldn’t you say?”
Nick is now pacing ovals around the pool, slaloming round the furniture as he listens.
“Bear cub, I have an appointment for a massage with a young man even more fetching than you are, and I’m about to be running late.”
“Sorry, Deirdre, I’ve hoovered up your time—”
“Nick,” she says, “you have no idea how much it means to me you called. You’re a gem, do you know that? But here’s a parting bit of advice, because advice is all I have to give: This is Andrew. As in the Holy See. Next in line to the Almighty. Not that Andrew doesn’t care what his actors think; far from it. That’s part of what makes him so great. He’s an actor, too. Remember? But what he wants, in the end, is what he gets. Have your say, let him listen—because he will—then follow orders.”
Nick hears her speaking quickly to someone else, her voice muffled.